Lorde Shush

About

Lorde Shush, also known as Lorde Shushing People or Lorde Shushing Concert, refers to several viral videos of pop singer Lorde shushing a live audience so they don't sing over her during her song "Writer in the Dark." The clips were deemed humorous and embarrassing for some on TikTok, leading to numerous videos where people debated whether Lorde was in the right for quieting the crowd, as well as some memes, skits and jokes about the trend in early 2022.

Origin

While there are multiple videos of Lorde shushing the crowd from her 2017 Melodrama tour, one of the most prominent comes from her June 16th, 2017, performance at New York City's Bowery Ballroom, where she shushed the crowd while singing "Writer in the Dark" a capella (shown below).

On March 11th, 2022, TikToker youtuberbanter^[1] posted a snippet of the concert showing the event, gaining over 1.7 million likes in two months (shown below).

Spread

On April 6th, 2022, TikToker cocolashar posted their video of the June 2017 concert from another angle, gaining over 15 million views in one month.

Over the following month, other clips of Lorde shushing the crowd were unearthed by people. On April 18th, 2022, YouTuber John Louie Luste posted a compilation of such moments, gaining over 90,000 views in two weeks (shown below).

The videos caused discussions on TikTok as people debated whether Lorde's move was justified. For example, on April 11th, TikToker @windowsillrry posted a video calling the act needlessly embarrassing, gaining over 41,000 likes in three weeks (shown below, left). TikToker @youtuberbanter defended Lorde's actions on March 22nd, saying she was right for silencing the crowd (shown below, right).

On April 23rd, Lorde addressed the controversy via the Instagram^[2] fan page "lordecontent." There, she said:

That was something that I did in that one song a couple of times when I wanted to sing it a cappella and/or off the microphone, so people could hear me and because I wanted to try something different. If you come to my shows you know that it's an hour and a half of us singing and screaming together…. Also, that dramatic ass move was literally for an album called Melodrama, so don't stress too hard.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References